Who better than Moorice, the world's greatest climate scientist, as companion in these apocalyptic end times?

There's never been a better or more exciting time to be a comedian making jokes about politics in the United States.

There was Colbert asking Republicans to choose between assorted bizarre, weird and wonderful statements, Trump or false, and the Republicans laughing at the outlandishness that made them fail the test.

Because idolising the barking mad is funny.

And that's just one example. So many delusionals in love with a huckster narcissist with sociopathic and fascist tendencies, and so little time. And whenever anyone quibbles about that sociopathic bit, the pond reminds them that this is a man who thinks that Abu Ghraib is some kind of role model for western civilisation, and that the good old USA can torture its way to peace.

And for those who seek comfort in the notion that it's all a passing trend, and will be over by fall - sorry Japan, tough luck Korea - the pond remembers that it takes only a Reichstag fire here or there to tip the balance, especially when the rival is difficult to love.

Of course it's easy enough to blame some of the root causes, the bizarre conjunction of reality television and Faux Noise.

The same behaviour was at work in the Seven network paying for its celebration of Pauline Hanson, well done David Koch and Samantha Armytage, Nine shouldn't take all the credit for lowering the conversational tone.

Roger Ailes  might have officially departed this morning, but the monster he has created will live on long after him, especially as the monster Murdoch has temporarily replaced him.

It's become so extreme and weird that the pond felt a vague sympathy for Ted Cruz performing the perfect troll, to a man, after all, who had insulted his wife's looks and said his father was somehow involved in the assassination of JFK (and just where did all that evidence he was a serial fornicator go? The pond was looking forward to the salacious details, just as it was waiting for news that the Kenyan Muslim's African birth certificate had finally been discovered, and Trump was in birther paradise).

Suddenly Clint Eastwood's empty chair looked like an oasis of sanity.

Throw in barking mad Islamic fundamentalists roaming around the world seeking innocents to destroy (to match the innocents destroyed by the west), and it's easy to see why some inane idiots inanely shoot off their idiot mouths about other idiots ...

It's not as if there aren't enough barking mad fundamentalist Islamic events in the world, without idiots going around hyperventilating and attempting to see the hand of Daesh in everything, as if it was a potent, invincible force, ready to take out corpulent Queenslanders (By George it here).

But all things considered, it was easy to see why the pond was primed, ready and ripe for a rich, foam-flecked invocation of the apocalypse, by none other than Moorice the Majestic, the world's greatest climate scientist, himself and in person, thanks as always to the lizard Oz...

Moorice was down the page a little and frankly the splash lacked a certain je ne sais quoi ...

Oh sure, it's a disaster, but where's the grabber, where's the hook?

Ah, that's better. Lenin! It's a Communist plot, which as everyone knows, is even worse than the Jewish lizard people conspiracy, with bonus crystals and British Royal family, that's running the world's banking system on a day to day basis ...

Naturally the pond scoured the great man's words for the first sighting of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov...

Now around this time, the pond began to experience buyer's remorse.

Once again Moorice has cited Deutsche Bank as some sort of expert bank with which to club other banks, and never mind that within the last week S and P decided to lower the credit outlook for Deutsche Bank from stable to negative because ... well because Deutsche Bank remains hopelessly exposed ...

Low interest rates and depressed client activity pose challenges for many banks but are “particularly unhelpful” for Deutsche Bank as it revamps its businesses under difficult conditions, SandP said. The bank will likely try to speed up cost-cutting and efforts to reduce its stable of risky assets, the ratings agency said. (You can google that at the WSJ if you like).

Yes, there's a certain irony quoting a bank about a litany of distortions and perversions when said bank has itself produced an admirable litany of distortions and perversions.

But the pond has been on about this with Moorice before, and besides there was still the siren lure of Lenin to lead the pond on ...

Still no Lenin, just Ludwig von Mises, something of an Ayn Rand follower in his day, as all the greatest minds are, provided they're willing to hide their name so they can join the social welfare queue in their end days ... that's what hubbies are good for,  to offer a name which hides the welfare queen routine ...

But while the pond was deeply indebted to Moorice for being reminded of Ayn, there was still no Lenin, and then came the sighting that had led to the title at the top of the column:

Hmm, that struck the pond as a worry.

Was the "true or not" a reference to the truth, or not, of Lenin's insight, or was it a sly hint by Moorice that perhaps it might not be true that Lenin had actually advocated what he was said to have advocated. And who might have suggested the wording?

As always, and unlike Moorice, the pond tends to turn to experts when such existential questions are asked, in this case a pdf of White and Schuler's 2009 Who Said "Debauch the Currency": Keynes or Lenin? (in pdf form).

The pond will cut straight to the spoiler summary:

It seems clear that Keynes’ statement, in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, that Lenin was “said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency,” was based on a report of an interview with Lenin that was published by prominent London and New York newspapers. There are grounds for questioning the veracity of the interview. The Daily Chronicle’s Special Correspondent in Geneva was very hostile to the Bolsheviks and tended to report gossip as if it were substantiated evidence (for example, Daily Chronicle, 1919a). Moreover, it seems odd that the correspondent and the interviewer were both anonymous, as Lenin gave a number of interviews to the Western press in 1919 that were signed when they were published (for example, Goode, 1919). Nevertheless, the remarks in the interview were consistent with a number of arguments emanating from Moscow at the time—specifically, the rationalization of inflation as the harbinger of a moneyless economy and the belief that the revolution would soon spread to the rest of Europe. Moreover, Lenin did not question the statement attributed to him in The Economic Consequences of the Peace when he addressed the Third International in 1920. 

The context of Keynes’s statement in The Economic Consequences of the Peace was the immediate danger of postwar hyperinflations in Europe. Keynes made the point clear in A Tract on Monetary Reform ([1923] 1971) when he concluded that both inflation and deflation “are evils to be shunned.” Nevertheless, Keynes (p. 36) wrote, “perhaps deflation is, if we rule out exaggerated inflations such as Germany, the worse; because it is worse, in an impoverished world, to provoke unemployment than to disappoint the rentier.” Modern mainstream economic practice agrees with Keynes on this point. To invoke Keynes’s quotation of Lenin on debauchment as applying to modern advanced economies, with their typically single-digit annual rates of inflation, is anachronistic, but in a few poorer economies—notably Zimbabwe, suffering a hyperinflation as of late 2008—the quotation continues to have “currency.” 

Hmm, put in those pedantic terms, it doesn't have quite the rhetorical flourish of an Ancient Mariner Moorice ... and as for calling sweet ancient old mariner Moorice anachronistic, the pond was swept up in an indignant bout of truthiness or perhaps Trumpiness or perhaps Mooriceness ...

Butit was great to clear that up, and even better it was truly wondrous to discover that deep in his heart, Moorice was actually a dedicated Keynesian!

Who'd have thought, but at least we know he'll be personning the pumps and pump priming as the financial apocalypse approaches ... and so to doomsday and the minute hand approaching the 12 ...

And since Moorice has already spoken in favour of Donald Trump, the pond knows exactly the right man to supply the steak for the barbecue of charcoal doom ...

Meanwhile, Pope is back and more Pope here... though really George could have starred just as easily ...